It matters.
It all fucking matters.
And he keeps treating it like a game.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the pressure building behind my eyes. The headache’s been creeping in since we left Damien’s office. I haven’t even opened my laptop since we got back. Haven’t returned a single call. Because I don’t know how the fuck we fix this.
Two knocks on my door make me inhale deeply.
I don’t have to look. Only one person knocks like that—like she belongs here, but she’s still polite enough to ask.
“Come in,” I say, already softening.
Corrine steps inside, holding two foam cups with plastic lids and striped straws. She gives me a faint smile and sets one on the edge of my coffee table without waiting for an invitation. Banana milkshakes. She always brings them after visiting her mom, despite the fact that I’ve told her a hundred times I hate bananas.
She still forgets. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she just likes the ritual of it.
“How was she today?” I ask, stepping away from the windows.
Corrine pauses mid-sip, then shrugs. “She blinked.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was me being hopeful.”
I nod, even though I don’t know what to say. Corrine never expects comforting words. She’s been through too much for anything I could offer to make a dent.
Her story is tragic—objectively so. And I know people say that about all trauma. That pain is pain. But hers?
Hers carved trenches.
A murder-suicide. Well—attempted suicide.
We were fifteen when she stumbled over to our house. I remember the blood first. Then the way her hair stuck to her cheek. The gash above her eyebrow. She didn’t cry. Just stood there, shell-shocked and silent. It was my mom who coaxed a few words out of her.
I remember the way my mom went still. The way she sent my dad sprinting across the lawn without another word.
Corrine’s mother had caved in her husband’s skull with a riding trophy—one of the dozens that lined the shelves inCorrine’s room. Beautiful, heavy things she used to polish after school.
Corrine was dropped off early when her riding lesson was canceled, and her mother came after her too—but whatever drugs she had taken kicked in, and all she managed was the gash.
Took five stitches.
Her father died. Her mother lived.
If you can call her current condition living.
Now she sits in a psychiatric center uptown. Catatonic. No speech, no eye contact. Just a slow, rhythmic tap of one finger against the armrest of her wheelchair. Over and over. Like she’s stuck in a loop no one can break her out of.
The doctors say she’s aware. That somewhere in there, behind the slack face and unblinking eyes, she knows what’s happening.
Corrine visits her every week, like clockwork.
And then she comes here, drinks milkshakes with me, and pretends it doesn’t gut her.
I pick mine up and swirl it, if only to give my hands something to do. It’s already melting, so I put it back down.
“How’d it go with Wolfe?” she asks.
